2023 Year End Check-in
Sorry December, you have to share with the rest of the months
Today's Anki card (now with a new custom background!) features a Thancred I respect. It made me think about my own things I do with that level of commitment.
Another month draws to an end, and with it so too does 2023. The passage of time is ever a cause for anxiety for me, but thankfully I still have a lot of positive things to look back on this year when it comes to Japanese learning related activities.
Reading
I'd like to reflect back on all the reading I did first, as that really is one of my favorite hobbies. A hobby within a hobby, I suppose!
This year, I read a total of 79 books. Of that number, 3 of them were manga with the rest being a mix of novels and light novels.
The first book I finished this year was 本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~第四部「貴族院の自称図書委員4」, which is the 17th volume. I love that I started my year with Bookworm considering how important of a series it is to me. It wasn't the last book I read this year, but I did finish the very last volume of the light novel series earlier in this month. It was definitely a 本好き year!
The very last book I read this year (yes I'm calling it a few days early, I haven't been reading much this past week!) was another of 凪良ゆう's books, 汝、星のごとく. It was the right balance between beautifully written and upsetting me! This author writes people in such a delicate and honest way that it's hard not to get wrapped up in these characters even when I find them to be annoying.
In between these two books, I read a few different series as well. I did the first 12 volumes of Hamefura (still waiting to read the 13th!), 9 volumes of NO. 6, and a few volumes from several different series as well. Notably, I started Guin Saga this year. I'm only 3 volumes into the 130 volumes that I have (and that the original author wrote before her passing), but this was a huge step for me. It's a pretty challenging series, but one that immediately hooked me. I hope to progress much further into the series in 2024.
I only read 3 manga, but I did enjoy my time with them in the summer. I tend to just gravitate towards light novels and other books more, but I hope I can get over my apprehension and read more manga in the future.
For a full list of my finished books, you can refer to this page! I find Learn Natively to be the easiest to update, so I can see myself continuing to use this for awhile.
Book clubs and finding new things to love on my own time really helped fueled this year's reading. Thank to you everyone who participated in those clubs this year! It was so fun reading along with you all.
I also ended up in a Wikipedia rabbit hole earlier this year. I'd read up on cheeses and various places I've been before. I was trying to make Wikipedia seem less intimidating, and I'm not entirely sure I succeeded but I learned a lot about cheese!
I definitely read some news here and there, but not nearly as much as I had done in previous years. When they're more exciting things to read, I'll just end up gravitating towards those these days!
The most interesting bit of reading I did though had to have come from Visual Novels this year! I finished two of them, Re:Birthday Song and Koshotengai no Hashihime throughout the year. I'm currently in the middle of two more: Un:Birthday Song and Amnesia for the Switch.
Listening
I don't watch or listen to things nearly as much as I read. Or maybe a better way to put it is that I track the things I read more religiously than the things I watch or listen to. I found that I spent a lot more time this year compared to others watching Anime or browsing YouTube though!
Some of the things on YouTube that I really enjoyed were various book 感想 videos. So if I ever finished reading something, I'd type in the name of the book + 感想 to see what other people thought of it. Sometimes I'd end up subscribing, sometimes not. I find it's easy to get lost in the exploration of YouTube without really remembering the channels I had viewed previously. But that was a core search I did throughout the year.
A few of the Booktuber channels I enjoy include 文学YouTuberベル, suzukaze 読書録, No7PUMP (I wish she’d do more videos!), マサキ/Masaki Books, and ペキョの小説紹介とか. The best part about watching even a few videos from these channels is that YouTube will start recommending a whole bunch of other related videos and channels!
In addition to that, I ended up on the Japanese people learning English side of YouTube. Channels such as Hina's, Ayane, and again just random videos related to the ones by those two that I had watched. I watched several videos on how to build an 英語脳 (English brain) which helped me to become more confident about building up my 日本語脳 (Japanese brain).
Booktubers and fellow language learners! Turns out, Japanese YouTube has a ton of these. It was really fun to browse and learn more about my hobbies in the language I'm learning.
I'm also an ASMR enjoyer, so I'd often search for 雑談 + asmr. Nice way to end the night!
As I mentioned above, I definitely watched more anime this year compared to previous years too. I don't always track these, even though I can on Learn Natively. I'm not entirely sure what my hang-up is, I just kind of do it when I remember to.
Spy X Family, 薬屋のひとりごと, Guin Saga, My Dress Up Darling, Mushoku Tensei, Overlord, Recovery of an MMO Junkie, Re:Zero, Bookworm (again hehe), Darling in the Franxx, The Case Files of Jeweler Richard, Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut, Kino, and most recently I started Frieren. Honestly there were probably more, but it was getting so tedious to list! Basically, I really let myself have fun and enjoy anime again. I think revitalizing my SRS time with Anki and subs2srs decks again contributed to this. My absolute favorite from this list has been 薬屋のひとりごと. It’s been a blast to mine from the subs2srs deck too!
I've listened to a few pieces of audio content as well, but not nearly as much as I could have! Tons of visual novels come with drama CDs, and Re:Birthday Song was among them. I listened to one of the character discs and it was so dreamy! Another thing I've listened to is the Flesh and Blood audio drama, or at least parts of it. I finished volume one of the novel so I may restart the audio drama from the beginning.
I used to be extremely into Japanese music when I was younger, but lately have had a hard time listening to most lyrical music at all. Sometime this past week I decided to listen to Angela Aki's music again on Spotify and had a positive experience. Sometimes the memories of music gets in my head way too much so I avoid it instead, but I didn't really have anything happen. This must sound ridiculous to normal people but I promise I'm working on this haha.
Gaming
Surprise surprise, my 2023 Japanese gaming was pretty much exclusively Final Fantasy XIV. I did resume and finish the main Pokémon Scarlet game too! I did some Cookie Clicker with the Japanese interface too I suppose! Most of my gaming this year in general has been in English with friends. Hm, thinking back I did play Diablo 4 with Japanese audio, but not text. I'll usually always switch the audio to Japanese if I can, even when playing with others.
My project to attempt to figure out how much text I can squeeze out of FFXIV has been going well though! I just finished the first dungeon of the game, and I'm at roughly 345 pages worth of text so far. With the amount of NPCs, side quests, main story quests, and open world events, there ends up being so much text in such a small amount of play time! I can't wait to catch up to current content, but at this pace I bet 8.0 will have released already. ("Don't you mean 7.0?" No, no I do not.)
Writing
Whew, I can't believe I have this section here! It started with my AJATT Road to 10,000 handwritten sentence Journal, but it has since evolved into me wanting to produce my own thoughts. So, I have a writing journal started with two full pages already!
My handwriting is still not the neatest, and I probably have a ton of mistakes. But I can't learn and grow without these messy initial steps!
I'm having a ton of fun coming up with my own thoughts after reading and putting them down on paper so I can collect Pokémon stickers. This is how I've chosen to gamify this action to make it more appealing to me! My ultimate goal is to basically run out of Pokémon stickers, which will mean more than 1,000 written entries. They're not terribly long just yet, and I don't write every day, but I know someday I can reach that goal.
Anki and Stats
Here we have my Anki in its full glory!
A few people have recommended the custom background addon, so I decided to finally do it too. Now my love for FFXIV can be on full display even while reviewing non-FFXIV cards! You may notice that I have a ton of new cards in my mining deck, and that is because I am a squirrel storing my nuts for the winter. That is to say, I'll be participating in the January Tadoku round and I will not be wanting to make cards during that. I have to stay fed somehow!
I'm glad I was able to get my unique morph count above 10,000 before the end of the year. It felt a bit awkward switching from JPDB halfway through this year and feeling like I had to "catch up", but with all the tools available these days it hasn't been bad at all. I've enjoyed mining new words from a variety of content, and my treasure box of sentences always makes me happy. It is a daily ritual that has kept me sane all year.
It's been a few months now and I think I'm still satisfied with how I use this spreadsheet. It's very lowkey tracking, usually only updating it after the first day I've started something and when I finish something. Having my ultimate reading goal counting down slowly has been very motivating. In that same vein, so has seeing my mined cards go up over time.
Because I use this for keeping track of words I want to find sentences for in my bank, as well as writing book club thoughts, I figured I’d share about Obsidian as well.
Previously, I was using Evernote to keep notes on a variety of things. From my persona life stuff to Japanese, I had built up thousands and thousands of notes across more than a decade. Lately, the app and the web version were becoming slower and slower, and then I see that if I want to keep using it, I need to pony up some cash. Hard pass.
Learning about Obsidian, it reminded me of Anki just a little bit. I own all my stuff, there’s a lot to learn about it in order to use it to its full potential, and its got an active community of people who love to use it and develop plugins for it!
Here’s my little home page note where it links to all my other important notes! The Anki section is where I keep my vocabulary list, as well as a secondary list of words I could not find a 1T sentence for yet. I pre-type up my handwritten journal entries in here first too. God honestly I love how organized I can be with this tool!
I have this silly idea to create a grammar index in Obsidian that will be full of grammar explanations and example sentences from things I’ve seen in context. I had a ton of notes from Evernote on grammar, but I think because of how easy it is to create new notes and link them to others in Obsidian, I’ll create the pages as needed. Just a fun side project!
I already started it today since I came across some stuff! Really excited to see how this grows the more I read.
On a personal note, this year had a lot of ups and downs. Life's undulations absolutely has had an effect on my mental state here and there, but having a hobby I love so much has really helped to keep me from despairing. Between a family member dying, several health scares with my dog, and a few of my own, I've had plenty of reasons to just not do anything. To wallow in despair and give up on things. This is, embarrassingly, what I used to do when I was met with difficult times.
I'm not exactly a saint or anything, but these days I've learned how to channel my emotions just a bit better into more positive things. For me, that's meant making subs2srs decks to make a better mining experience in Anki, and taking more and more walks for my health. These things seem a bit small on the surface, but have made a world of difference for me.
On my walks, I try to think in Japanese. Sometimes it's just attempting to narrate what I'm seeing around me, other times I'm trying to create an essay in my head that vanishes the second I get a pen in my hand. After a walking session, reading becomes so much more easier at least! Though, sometimes I walk in place *and* read, and I love the feeling of 一石二鳥. I shared with a friend that while reading the final Bookworm volume, I ended up at over 9,000 steps according to my apple watch. I didn't even realize! I just had a ton of feelings and needed to move my feet, haha.
I love learning Japanese. I love reading in Japanese. I love trying to do new things in Japanese. I love being surrounded by people who also love learning and doing things in Japanese. Life is fucking hard, but having something to hold on to, and people to share it with, has been such a blessing.
Thank you all so much for being part of one of the years of all time. I plan on writing about my specific 2024 goals as my first post of 2024, so please look forward to it! I cannot wait to walk through the new year with all of you!
Do you usually watch anime without subs, or with JP subs?
I don't think it's weird that you don't feel like doing stuff that you enjoyed in the past (re: your Japanese music era). I also feel like that often, because I used to love watching anime in my teens and I nowadays even if I try sitting down and watching some anime I don't really feel like it? It's frustrating, especially because there are some series I really enjoy watching, but it feels like I don't really enjoy the act of watching anime on itself anymore, somehow. So I think I get you!
The Anki background is so cool, and such a good idea to spice up the SRS time! I will try to remember to set it up next time I decide to use Anki, feels like a great way to make review time cozier haha.
I love that you are now using Obsidian! I have been using Obsidian for a couple of years now and I love it. I am not too diligent/organized with regards to its usage and that's something I would like to improve on. I feel like I don't get the most out of the "second brain" approach you are supposed to folow. But I mainly use it as a note taking app in which I own the data, just like you mentioned! I don't pay for Obsidian Sync, so I use the Obsidian Git plugin to sync across my computers. But I still haven't figured out a good way to set it up with my iPhone, which is a shame because there are many times in which I am away from any of my computers and I'd like to take some Obsidian notes. I am interested to hear more about how you are using it, so I might reach out on Discord to pester you about that!
I've also taken a liking to taking walks since last year, and this year I've continued the trend. I have always been a stay-at-home kind of person, and I don't go out for a walk every day. But I've started doing it because it's been great for my mental health (and physical, which is a plus!) and I have also been choosing to walk instead of taking public transit quite often (for shorter trips, of course). Life does get pretty tough, so I'm glad you also find comfort in that and in partaking in Japanese daily ^^
Thank YOU for sharing your journey with us on the regular, and I hope you have a great welcoming of the next year! I wish you the best in 2024!